John Hultman helped launch the all-news radio station WBBM-AM in 1968 and went on to be one of the station’s top news anchors over a period spanning more than 50 years.
The sure-and-steady-voiced Hultman and his longtime anchor partner, Felicia Middlebrooks, were near the top of the ratings for the morning-drive airwaves for 14 years in the 1980s and ‘90s, and Hultman came out of retirement in 2008 for two more years of anchoring with Middlebrooks.
“John and I wanted to talk to people, not at them,” said Middlebrooks. “We did our best to deliver sound journalism and ethical journalism. … It was a great privilege to be not just John’s colleague but his friend.”
Hultman, 89, died of natural causes on March 15 at Endeavor Health Glenbrook Hospital in Glenview, said his son, Erik. He had been a longtime Northbrook resident.
Born in Chicago in 1937, Hultman grew up in Wilmette and graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka. In 1958, he earned a bachelor’s degree in speech from Purdue University, where he also played clarinet in the school’s marching band.
After college, Hultman served for six months in active duty in the Army. He then took a job at WASK-AM in Lafayette, Indiana, before returning home for an on-air job at a small Evanston radio station, WNMP-AM — now known as WCGO-AM.
Soon afterward, Hultman joined a Fort Wayne, Indiana TV station, WPTA. Under the air name “John Douglas,” he hosted a children’s TV show, “Popeye and Rascals Club,” and a local Saturday night dance show.
In 1960, Hultman joined WWJ-AM/FM and WWJ-TV in Detroit, first as a radio disc jockey. Three years later, after the radio station converted its format to all-talk, Hultman shifted to the newsroom, which was a joint TV and radio newsroom. In that role, Hultman did both television news — anchoring and street reporting — and radio news.
In February 1968, Hultman returned to Chicago when he was hired by future “Chicago Tonight” host John Callaway, who was tasked with turning the station’s format to all-news from the existing news and talk format that it had had since December 1964. Hultman was hired as a staff announcer, and he “did a little bit of everything for the first month or two,” he said in a 1987 oral history with broadcaster and historian Chuck Schaden.
On May 6, 1968, WBBM launched its all-news format. At the outset, Hultman anchored the evening news alongside longtime newsman John Madigan.
“When we started all-news, it was all rather new,” Hultman told the Tribune in 1998. “Callaway was given one month to change it to an all-news station.”
In addition to anchoring and reporting, Hultman served as the station’s news director from December 1972 until April 1982. His reporting in the field included covering Pope John Paul II’s visit to Chicago in 1979.
Hultman was driving home after the morning drive shift in May 1979, when American Airlines Flight 191 crashed near O’Hare International Airport, killing 273 people. Hultman headed straight to O’Hare and remained on the air reporting well into that night.
As news director, Hultman also served as executive producer and news anchor for Bob and Betty Sanders’ midday shift in the mid-1970s. In 1978, Hultman replaced Frank Beaman in WBBM’s morning-drive anchor slot alongside Dale McCarren.
Hultman stepped down as news director in 1982 and was named a special roving correspondent. He also remained in the morning-drive slot, and in October 1984, WBBM’s newly appointed news director, Carl Dickens, decided to team up Hultman and Middlebrooks to “make the station brighter and more consistent sounding,” the Tribune’s Eric Zorn wrote at the time. Middlebrooks became the station’s first female morning-drive news anchor.
Listeners embraced the new pairing. Hultman and Middlebrooks ranked in the top five among morning-drive shows in Chicago, always behind WGN-AM’s top-rated Bob Collins’ morning show. WBBM’s all-news format itself was similarly highly rated during the 1980s and ‘90s.
“We share our listeners with a lot of different radio stations,” Hultman told the Tribune in 1993. “People listen to us for the immediate information they need and then come back to us when there’s a big story like the Chicago flood or the riots in Los Angeles.”
Retired WBBM political editor Craig Dellimore, who joined the station in 1983 from Washington, D.C., recalled Hultman’s generous spirit, including welcoming Dellimore to WBBM.
“Even though he was no longer news director, he was a leader by example,” Dellimore said. “You could tell with his spirit how much he loved the business and really always simply intended to do the best job. And when (Dickens) put Felicia Middlebrooks and John Hultman together, that was genius. Their pairing just created something magical. They got along so well.”
Middlebrooks said that to get up that early in the morning to come to work, “you had to have a reason, and our objectives were strongly aligned.”
“We felt it was not, oh, I’ve got to get up in the morning, but, I get to get up in the morning,” she said. “We were performing a service, and informing the public so they could make informed decisions. And we wanted to come across to listeners as their friends.”
And despite the pair’s 20-year age difference, Middlebrooks said, she felt the two had “so much in common.”
“I learned wisdom from him, and he said I kept him young,” she said.
When big stories broke, Hultman told the Tribune in 1998, station staff always sprang into action. Middlebrooks called WBBM’s news operation “a well-oiled machine.”
“We do have much more of an idea of what goes where,” Hultman told the Tribune in 1998. “We do our best work when a big story breaks. Everybody gets together. That’s when we really shine.”
Hultman announced his retirement in 1998, eyeing a freelance voice-over career afterward. He told the Tribune in 1998 that he would miss getting up early.
“I know that sounds crazy, but I will miss it,” he said.
Hultman rejoined WBBM as a substitute anchor in 2002, and in 2008 — 10 years after his first retirement — he was named interim morning news co-anchor, alongside his longtime partner Middlebrooks, replacing longtime morning co-anchor Pat Cassidy.
Upon Cassidy’s return to the station in 2010, Hultman relinquished the reins as morning co-anchor, but continued work as a substitute anchor at WBBM until retiring for good in 2020.
Hultman was named Illinois Journalist of the Year by Northern Illinois University’s department of journalism in 1994.
Outside of work, Hultman enjoyed narrating holiday concerts at Orchestra Hall for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and serving as the voice of Purdue’s marching band at home football games. He also liked singing in his church choir, sailing and baking bread, which he would hand out to coworkers and friends during the holidays.
“Every year around the holidays, he would bake more than 100 loaves,” Erik Hultman said. “At one point, he had an apron that said ‘Doughboy.’”
In addition to his son, Hultman is survived by his wife of 66 years, Wilma; a daughter, Julie Chalmers; another son, Chris; five grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and a sister, Claire Christine Thomas.
Services are pending.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
